Shahzad Gets Life Term for Times Square Bombing Attempt

At his sentencing hearing Tuesday in Manhattan, Faisal Shahzad said he was a “proud” terrorist and warned of more attacks. The judge replied, “I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.”Credit
Elizabeth Williams/Associated Press

The defendant came to Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday ready to ladle out several minutes of anti-American justification for his act of terrorism in Times Square. But the judge, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, best known of late for presiding over Martha Stewart’s trial, came ready, too.

She repeatedly interrupted the defendant, Faisal Shahzad, to spar with him over his interpretation of the Koran, his invocation of a Muslim warrior in the Crusades and, above all, the relevance of any of it to the life sentence that hung over him like the dozen United States deputy marshals who guarded the prisoner in court.

And after the judge formally sentenced Mr. Shahzad to life in prison, she left him a parting shot: “I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.”

The six or eight minutes or so of back and forth brought a bit of drama to the endgame of a case that, as nerve-rattling as it was at its inception, with the discovery of a potentially lethal bomb in Times Square on May 1, had drawn to a close with the sentencing on Tuesday.

The hearing was a part-sentencing and part-scolding, and the latter started before the former. Judge Cedarbaum looked at Mr. Shahzad, seated between lawyers, his beard thick and his hair long under his white skullcap, and said, “I think you should get up.”

Mr. Shahzad, 31, rose. He seemed to have aged in the last five months from the boyish man who was arrested aboard a jet at Kennedy Airport.

He asked the judge for 5 or 10 minutes, then launched into a soliloquy that was at times rambling, at times threatening and delivered with the crinkly-eyed grin of a man who acted as if he could not be happier than where he was at that moment.

“This is but one life,” he said. “If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.”

He made his one and only reference to his arrest by claiming, for the first time, that his rights had been denied. Law enforcement officials have said that immediately following his arrest, on May 3, Mr. Shahzad cooperated, but he said otherwise on Tuesday.

“On the second day of my arrest, I asked for the Miranda,” he said, referring to the required notification of his right to counsel. “And the F.B.I. denied it to me for two weeks” and threatened his wife and children, he said. The judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers stayed silent as Mr. Shahzad, who has mounted no substantive defense in his case and who pleaded guilty to all charges against him on June 21, continued to speak. His lawyer, Philip L. Weinstein, had no comment on the statements after the hearing.

Photo

Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, had admitted planting a bomb in a vehicle in Times Square on May 1. The bomb failed to detonate, and he was arrested on May 3.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Shahzad attacked the American military forces “who have occupied the Muslim lands,” and said that attacks like his attempted bombing would continue.

“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” he said. “Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”

He went on about the war and about the “fragile economy” that he said would soon prove unable to sustain the troops, when Judge Cedarbaum interrupted and asked, “Do you want to comment in any way in connection with sentence?” He said he was getting to that, his motivations, when the judge asked, “Didn’t you swear allegiance to this country when you became an American citizen?”

He smiled like a boy caught in a fib, and said as much: “I did swear, but I did not mean it.”

“You took a false oath?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“Sure,” he began, and went on to say, “Blessed be” Osama bin Laden, “who will be known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade, and blessed be those who give him asylum.”

The judge stopped him again. “How much do you know about Saladin, as you called him?”

He is known in the Middle East as Salahuddin al-Ayubi, but commonly known in the West as Saladin, the Muslim leader who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. He is remembered in biographies as being a lover of peace who waged war reluctantly.

“He didn’t want to kill people,” the judge told the defendant.

“He liberated — ” Mr. Shahzad continued.

“He was a very moderate man,” Judge Cedarbaum said. Mr. Shahzad spoke more about the war in Iraq and said, “If you call us terrorists, then we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people at peace.”

He finished, and it was time for the sentencing by Judge Cedarbaum. “Although happily, the training you sought in making bombs was unsuccessful and you were unsuccessful in your effort to kill many Americans,” she said, the facts of the case “require that you be incarcerated for life.”

She began going through the 10 separate sentences he faced: “I sentence you to life in prison,” she said.

“Allahu akbar,” he replied. (“God is great.”)

“I understand that you welcome that,” the judge said.

Mr. Shahzad was handcuffed and led away.

Correction: October 14, 2010

An article on Oct. 6 about the sentencing of the Times Square car bomber, Faisal Shahzad, referred incorrectly to the jetliner that he was on at the time of his arrest. It was still at the gate at Kennedy Airport; it had not been cleared for takeoff.

A version of this article appears in print on October 6, 2010, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Judgment Day in Two High-Profile Cases: Times Square’s Would-Be Bomber
Is Defiant as He Gets a Life Term. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe